


Dreaming is an Art

by Titty_Now_Titty_Later (orphan_account)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Depression, Gen, attempted suicide, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 12:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5048155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Titty_Now_Titty_Later
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If only she rose again like a Lady Lazarus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreaming is an Art

**Lady Lazarus – Sylvia Plath**  
_Dying_  
_Is an art, like everything else._  
_I do it exceptionally well._

_I do it so it feels like hell._  
_I do it so it feels real._  
_I guess you could say I’ve a call._

Dreaming is an art, just like everything else and Mallory Miles did it exceptionally well. The first time Arthur met her was Paris, 1995. He had been twenty-one and world-weary and could not speak a word of French. And she had been _so_ French. Exquisitely so. She’d singled him out and hung herself on his arm like the most poised and elegant accessory, and had asked him how he dreamed.

Disillusioned and broken, he thought something had gotten lost in translation, or perhaps it was culture shock. “How do I dream?” he’d repeated, brows drawing a furrow between his eyes. “By sleeping, of course.”

She’d given him a smile one part indulgent and two parts mischievous and he’d fallen in love on the spot. He didn’t need her to brush her fingers across the breast pocket of his Dolce & Gabbana and murmur in his ear like a flirtation, _“Here,_ Rex.”

He told her he didn’t dream and she must have recognised something in him. She brushed her hands across his shoulders and called him Arthur only once for the entirety of their acquaintance and subsequent friendship. He became Rex, like the king, like Arthur. _Like_ Arthur. But not _Arthur._ And Arthur loved it. Arthur loved Mallory, who became Mal all too quickly.

“I like Mal better,” she’d told him over a bottle of Pinot Noir under a velvet sky. “Do you know what it means?” she’d asked, lips curling into a mystery over the rim of her red. Arthur shook his head and reminded her he didn’t speak French. “Mal,” she’d told him, taking a sip and not letting her eyes drop from his, “means ‘bad’.”

“You don’t seem all that bad,” he’d told her, nothing but truth. The smile she directed at the table held a million secrets. Somehow, he knew they weren’t his.

Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when she married a man with beautiful dreams two years later.

“This is my Arthur,” she’d introduced him, the only time his name slipped past her lips. She wrinkled her nose, as though it didn’t sit right. Arthur couldn’t help but agree, but he liked the way Dominick never tried to call him Rex. He wasn’t Mal’s Arthur, but Rex would always only be hers.

Maybe he should have worried about them, about how much they loved. But Dominick loved Mal and Mal loved love, so utterly and irrevocably French was she. Arthur remembered her telling him her favourite flowers were red roses and he’d said, “Mal, you can’t love red roses most. Red roses are everyone’s favourite.”

She’d smiled like she knew something he couldn’t and told him, “But red roses are love. My dear Rex, it is more important to love than to prove everyone else wrong.”

Arthur couldn’t save her.

Dominick couldn’t save her.

Arthur sometimes wondered, in the following months, if Dominick hadn’t been a catalyst. If their love had been so bright and all-consuming that there was nothing left of her at twenty-eight years young.

It was like the Paris of that year had ceased to exist, as though Mal had been a mother cradling him and he had been as naïve as a child without fear of the past. To be thrown into 2004 with nothing seemed worse, somehow, than the nothing he’d had before Mal. For the first time in nine years, he was alone. For the first time in his life, he had nothing after tasting what it was to have something.

Dreaming is an art, like anything else. Mallory Miles did it exceptionally well. Arthur thinks that maybe she became lost in her dreams.

Dying is an art, like dreaming. Arthur Cohen has nothing near the finesse Mal showed. Arthur can’t make it look graceful, can’t stand how she held her beauty even in death, but he doesn’t think about things like finesse and grace when he’s three months fresh from mourning a woman who loved roses more than she hated being the same as everyone else.

Arthur sinks his hands into the too-hot water and tries to rationalise his actions to her memory.

 ** _You_** _did it,_ he thinks, lips curled into a snarl to warn away anything but anger. He doesn’t have it in him to blame her, though, even after everything.

 _You left me behind,_ he thinks, fists curled too tightly under the surface, their image distorted by ripples of his tension.

 _You left me with nothing,_ he thinks and gives up.

Water echoes on the tiles when he reaches for the blade gleaming with promise by the sink, desperation and fear bleeding the grace from his fingers. Hers is the only grace he’s thinking about when it slips across his wrist, ten-year-old scar tissue parting as though it couldn’t bear to remain intact a moment longer. Drops of water hang from his fingers and he thinks about how she kissed him better, lips against fingertips, holding the seams together against the flood. The water is black with his blood and there’s too much, but not nearly enough.So he switches shaking hands and transfers the metal’s kiss to the other wrist, fingers numbing until the blade skitters across the floor and his hot cheek is pressed hungrily to the cool tiles.

His eyes are bleeding tears and his wrists are crying blood; his entire body is heaving with nausea and sobs because all he feels now is _regret._

 _Oh, god,_ he thinks, too late. _I promised her I’d take care of him._ His eyes shutter closed, blind to Dominick’s frantic entrance. _And he…_

Dominick is sitting by the uncomfortable bed, shoulders rounded with the weight of too many lives. His face is turned away, to the too-bright painting hung obnoxiously on the wall. Arthur doesn’t need to see it when his eyes open for the first time in days. He can imagine the new lines creasing his brow; can picture the downward pinch of his mouth, his tired eyes.

“You need me,” he tries to say, voice rough with exhaustion.

Dominick doesn’t turn and doesn’t startle. His shoulders heave in a silent sigh and his head sinks a few degrees. “I don’t need you dead,” he says, voice cracking with the last word. “I don’t…” He draws a breath, tries to raise his head, gives up. “She told me to look after you,” he whispers, voice harsh against the steady surety of the machines measuring out Arthur’s life. “It was the last… the last promise I thought I could keep. “

“It shouldn’t have been,” Arthur says and tries so, so hard to find his anger. “It shouldn’t,” he says, and it sounds defeated.

“I told her we’d grow old together.” His voice is muffled by his hands, covering his face. “I told her…”

Arthur wants to tell him he shouldn’t make promises like that. Arthur wants to tell him he doesn’t need to be looked after. Arthur wants to tell him Mal had asked the exact same thing of Arthur, the last time he’d seen her. Arthur wants a lot of things. It took him twenty-one years to learn how to take them.

It took him a single ten-minute conversation with a police officer to learn how to stop.

So he doesn’t tell Dominick he’ll take care of him. Instead he says, “I’m going to Mombasa,” because it is the first city far, far away from Paris he can think of.

“You can’t just run away from this, Arthur,” Dominick says and sounds angry. Arthur, through his numbness, finds it in him to be jealous of his emotion. “You’re the last promise I made her. I’m not going to let you do something like this again.”

“Better make sure I don’t then,” he sighs and turns his head away, body too exhausted to do much more. He’s going to Mombasa, and he’s going with Dominick, and he’s going to escape the ghost of Mal. He’s going to hate every second of it.

Paris suited him like Mal suited him. He can’t imagine another city. But somehow, turning his head away from Dominick doesn’t feel like turning his back on Mal.

 _I’ll see you later,_ it feels like.

_Á la prochaine._

It feels like _I’ll come back when it hurts less._

It feels like a promise he plans on keeping.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this near the start of the year for an English assignment and kind of forgot to ever post it; taking the themes and emotion from a poem and transferring them into a short story. 
> 
> Out of the offered poems I chose Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath, obv.


End file.
